Sharon’s Legacy

Sharon has been lauded and eulogized by his fawning fans—including a doting George W. Bush—as an indomitable ‘warrior’ and ‘courageous’ soldier. He has been an inseparable factor in all the wars that Israel unleashed against its Arab neighbours and quarries. He is credited with an ‘iron will’ that yields to no pressure. However, he is now involved in a battle—most likely the last of his life—that he is not expected to win.

Sharon’s brush with death brings a summary end to the career of a soldier-politician who put a hectoring stamp on everything he encountered, whether on the battle -field, the campaign trail or in the Israeli Knesset. His words and body language, both, aroused intense passion and reaction on both sides of the divide: among his followers as well as in the opposition camp.

In all the years that he loomed, in the words of admiring western news media, like a ‘colossus’ over the Middle East politics, Sharon inspired intense controversy in whatever he did. His founding of the Likud Party in 1973 heralded the rise of right wing politicians hooked on the Zionist dream of a ‘Greater Israel’ spanning all the Arab lands from the River Jordan to the Euphrates. He then embarked on colonizing the captured Palestinian lands on the West bank under the slogan of Ertz Israel granted to the Jews in perpetuity under Biblical injunctions. To the right wing, ultra orthodox, lunatic fringe of Rabbinical Jews, Sharon became a demigod because of his mantle of ‘father of settlements’ on the Palestinian lands.

But it was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon—masterminded by him behind the back of Prime Minister Menahim Begin—that accorded Sharon international notoriety as a warrior of doom and depravity. The wholesale terror that the Israelis and their Lebanese protégés, the Phalange, unleashed on hapless Palestinians made Sharon a hate-figure forever for the Arabs in particular, and Muslims in general.

For the wanton massacre of Palestinians at the camps of Sabra and Shatilla, Sharon was censured by the Israeli establishment for being ‘indirectly responsibility.’ That, under an international outcry over Sharon’s crime, was the least the Israeli justice could do to save the country’s face. But Sharon’s shelf appeal to the Zionists and the fledgling flanks of settlers got a hefty boost from what suffering and pain he had single-handedly inflicted on the Palestinians. For his ruthless, Rambo-like, macho exploits, Sharon became a larger-than-life cult figure in the esteem of his adoring right wing fans, as much in Israel as across the Atlantic in U.S.

Sharon knew how to build on his cult capital and morph it into an asset envied by many inside Israel. No Israeli leader worth his salt could ignore Sharon’s popularity with the settlers and their well-heeled bank rollers in the States. Shamir rehabilitated him in the late 80s and entrusted him with the Housing portfolio, something that Sharon relished so much. He indulged in a massive settlement programme for the settlers, seizing Palestinian lands at random to whet his and his followers’ insatiable appetitte. Money flowed in billions of dollars in US bank guarantees for the loans generously offered to the land-grabbing settlers.

The legacy that Sharon built for himself with such single-minded application was not so much his pursuit of settling the greedy Israeli expansionists on Palestinian lands as his ruthless persecution of the Palestinians, in whichever way possible. That is the legacy destined to outlive him, whether he dies now or later.

All his life, Sharon excelled other inveterate Israeli leaders—Begin, Shamir, Golda Meir et al—in his brutal bulldozing of Palestinian rights. What he did as Prime Minister, literally bulldozing thousands of Palestinian homes, farms and orchards was symptomatic of his congenital hatred of the Arabs and the Palestinians. Unlike all other leaders in his class of Palestinian tormentors, Sharon was a Sabra—a Palestinian-born Jew who got in his genes from his settler-parents a congenital and pathological hatred of the Palestinians whom the American-born Golda Meir had refused to acknowledge as ‘a people’. Suffering from the same syndrome, Sharon, too despised the Palestinians as ‘interlopers’ in Ertz Israel and saddled himself with the life-long mission to uproot and drive them into wilderness.

It was this mental fixation that was behind Sharon’s brazen expulsion of PLO and Yasser Arafat from Lebanon. Sharon regarded this achievement of his as his finest hour but regretted—a remorse often articulated by him in the years since then—that he hadn’t finished Arafat in Beirut. But he got even with Arafat when the Palestinian leader died in dubious circumstances, in the twilight of 2004, after prolonged incarceration in his compound at Ramallah under Sharon’s command.

Sharon and his thugs and goons in the Israeli intelligence didn’t leave the Palestinian leadership in peace in their forced exile in Tunis. Scores of prominent Palestinian leaders, such as Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, were killed in cold blood by Israeli death squads in a policy of state terrorism that was hailed as heroism by mealy-mouthed western admirers of Israel.

So fixated was Sharon with his missionary persecution of the Palestinians that he simply wouldn’t allow them a respite in the wake of the ersatz peace hammered out in the wake of Oslo and the subsequent return of PLO to the occupied West bank and Gaza. He remained committed to his life-long mission never to leave the Palestinians in peace.

It was Sharon who, with his provocative ‘walk’ and intrusion into Al Quds, in the summer of 2000, provided the spark for the second Palestinian Intifada and then used the mushrooming Palestinian militancy to stake his own claim as the ‘man of the moment’ to deliver Israel from the flames of Palestinian ‘terrorism’. His victory at the 2001 polls confirmed his stature as Israel’s ‘man of crisis’ who wouldn’t shrink from using the most brutal methods to rein in the Palestinians and unleash his own state terrorism against them with impunity.

Sharon’s rise to the pinnacle of Israeli politics in 2001 coincided with the controversial election of George W. Bush in U.S. Sharon was, thenceforth, assured of a soul-mate in the White House who would never second guess whatever Sharon did to muzzle and maul the Palestinians because his own evangelical belief rhymed with it. The American neo cons and evangelicals were hopelessly sold to the ideology that Israel must have suzerainty over the ‘promised land’ in order to pave way for the return of the Messiah.

The western world in particular has made much of Sharon’s much-ballyhooed unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, last summer. Even some of the eastern satraps and acolytes of George W. Bush were so taken by this hideous move as to parrot their mentor’s mantra of Sharon being a ‘man of peace.’

However those with an eye capable of reading between the lines could well see that Sharon was merely throwing the scrap of a largely useless and barren land at the disenfranchised Palestinians in order to keep the fertile Palestinian lands on the West bank forever under Israeli occupation and control. His was the classical gambit of a seasoned chess player: he was ready to sacrifice a pawn or two in order to save the king from being checkmated.

The Israelis are already in possession of more than 78 percent of the old Palestine, land captured by them from the Arabs since 1948. The remaining 22 percent is under effective Israeli control. Of this disputed land, Sharon’s ‘road map’ to peace with the Palestinians doesn’t envisage sharing anything at all of East Jerusalem, comprising nearly 4 percent of 22 percent, leaving only 18 percent on the table. Out of this he planned to keep at least 58 percent under perpetual Israeli possession because that’s where he, the father of settlements, has built huge Jewish settlements, of course with American money.

So the best Sharon, the ‘man of peace’ ever meant to offer the Palestinians—that too at the point of a gun in the manner of a hectoring conqueror—was not more than 7 percent of all that land that had been Palestine for millennia. And, to add insult to injury, that scrap of 7 percent was never deemed, under the Sharon plan, to be anything more than disparate, disjointed Bantustans forever at the mercy of the Israelis for everything, from fresh water to movement from one Bantustan to another.

Even the move to desert Likud, the party he had conceived and delivered, and form another, Kadima (forward) was inspired by his vision to translate into reality his dream of keeping the Palestinians forever chained to Israeli largesse and mercy. All through this turbulent period in Palestinian-Israeli relations, Sharon kept his settlement- building going at a frenzied pace, along with the erection of a new ‘Berlin Wall’ while he systematically emasculated the authority of Mahmood Abbas to lead the Palestinians. Before suffering his brain haemorrhage and slipping into an induced coma, Sharon had convinced his partners and admirers in Europe and U.S. that the Palestinians couldn’t have their democratic elections for a Parliament with Hamas as a contender among others.

Hamas, in a weird twist of logic, is a terrorist outfit to the Europeans and the Americans because Sharon so said. But they must suffer from amnesia because Sharon, their favoured ‘man of peace’ won his spurs as a teen-age terrorist working for Jewish terrorist outfits, like Hagana and Stern, where the seeds of his legacy as a sworn enemy of the Arabs and the Palestinians were sown. His background doesn’t differ too much from Saddam Hussain’s who was, likewise, hired as a youthful assassin by the Baathist Party. But look at how vastly differently the two are being treated at the bar of western politics and justice: one is being acclaimed as a hero and statesman while the other is being tried as a condemned pariah and villain.